Microsoft, DoJ legal battle on data held abroad to start this week

Microsoft Corp and the US justice department will face each other in a legal battle in the Supreme Court.

According to commentators, in the high-stakes case that could affect the online privacy of US citizens, the issue is whether US law enforcement officials conducting a criminal investigation can demand data held in other countries.

A federal appeals ruled against it, but both sides in the case agree that the law has failed to keep up with modern technology.

What is known about the data is that it relates to a narcotics-trafficking investigation dating back to 2013 and that it is stored in a giant server farm in Ireland.

A search warrant for the e-mails was issued by a federal judge in New York, but Microsoft challenged the order in court.

The unidentified person at the centre of the case registered for his Microsoft MSN email account as a resident of Ireland, according to one of the lower court opinions.

According to Microsoft, its policy at the time of the search warrant was to store email content in the data centre nearest to the customer's self-declared country of residence.

"The stakes are really high," CNN Money reported quoting Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel and director of the Freedom, Security, and Technology Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology. "It's going to set the tone for cross-border data demands on a global scale."

In 2013 prosecutors served Microsoft a warrant in Redmond, Washington, for emails and information associated with an account involved in a criminal drug-trafficking investigation.

Microsoft handed over the data it had stored on its servers in the US, but some information was stored on a server in Ireland. Microsoft chose to withhold the foreign data.

While the warrant was initially approved by a lower court judge, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected the warrant in favour of Microsoft (MSFT).